Sangoma Success Stories

Fourteen IP

Sangoma

The Customer

Fourteen IP is the World’s leading provider of cloud-based telephony service for hotels with over 100,000 guest rooms connected to their fully managed hospitality platform, called Evolution Voice. Fourteen IP operates from offices in the UK, Europe and North America and serve independent hotels as well as the World’s leading chains such as Marriott, Hilton, Four Seasons, IHG and many more.

Business Challenges

The global hospitality industry has thousands of on premise phone systems (or PBXs) which are 10-25 years old and are in desperate need of a modern replacement. The industry has delayed the replacement of these systems because historically replacement did not offer any new features or benefits over that of the older systems already deployed. The revenue that properties receive from guests making calls, using the property phones, continues to diminish with the growth of cellular phones. A new phone system solution would need to be cost effective, as well as offer clear benefits to the sites and owners. The Evolution Voice solution, by Fourteen IP, offers these cost effective business benefits for the hospitality industry. It eliminates the on premise phone system, where all the hotel telephones connect to the phone system services offered by Evolution Voice over the internet. The challenge is that virtually all of these hotels using old phone systems also have analog telephones in their guest rooms, backrooms, meeting rooms and elevators. Ensuring that these devices are kept in place and can co-exist with Evolution Voice is a fundamental part of their offering. Neil Tolley, Managing Director of Fourteen IP, says “98% of hotels have analog phones they have invested in and have no wish to replace. Ensuring we can retain those devices with a gateway that is reliable, cost effective and easy to manage is a huge part of our solution and the success of Evolution Voice”.Sangoma offers a line of high density VoIP gateways, called the Vega 3000G series, which seamlessly connects analog devices to IP infrastructures. Available in a 24 and 50 port variant (called the Vega 3000G and Vega 3050G, respectively), each supports up to 24/50 analog phones and up to 12 kilometers distance from the gateway, which is perfect for hotels which can install them in their typical IT closet without worrying about line length issues. They are also the most resilient VoIP gateways in their class so that in the case the IP connection to the gateway goes down, the analog handsets can still communicate with each other and most important can make outbound emergency calls to a PSTN connection. They were the perfect choice for Fourteen IP because they also had tight integration with BroadWorks, which is the platform they use to provide their Evolution Voice solution. In a typical hotel environment with analog phones, Fourteen IP deploys numerous Vega 3000G / Vega 3050G at the edge of the network. All the analog phones connect to the gateway, which then connects to Evolution Voice over the hotel’s existing internet connection. Through this setup, Fourteen IP delivers all their features to hotel users, whilst guaranteeing their support and services, including that of the Vega gateways.

Solutions From Sangoma

To solve this challenge, Fourteen IP approached Sangoma Technologies, a company which has had a long and successful history in delivering products which provide seamless connectivity of legacy and VoIP infrastructures for many industries, including hospitality.

The Results

Fourteen IP has had great success deploying Sangoma Vega VoIP gateways as part of their converged communication solutions that they are now a standard piece of equipment within their offerings. Neil Tolley explains, “ Our Engineers are very pleased with how easy it is to configure these gateways with our BroadWorks platform. They are also very pleased with the disaster recovery features of these units, providing great value to the services they offer. As Neil explains “If the internet connection between the Vega gateways and our hosted platform goes down, for any reason, all the hotel handsets can still communicate and even make outbound calls to the local telco”. Fourteen IP is continuing to build their relationship with Sangoma as they have started deploying hundreds of Sangoma’s Vega 100/200 digital VoIP gateways as part of their other SIP Trunk solution.

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